Re: Brasero 2.27.91 release

[Joerg Schilling fokus fraunhofer de (Joerg Schilling)]

Pacho Ramos <pacho condmat1 ciencias uniovi es> wrote:

> > What else do you believe I could do?
> > 
> > The claim that there is a license problem with cdrtools is nothing but 
> > libel. There never was any legal proof for these claims. 
> > 
> > Note: these claims have been published by people who do not own _any_ even
> > minimal part of the Copyright in the cdrtools project. These people for this
> > reason cannot sue anybody. 
> > 
> > Although I don't need to proof that this FUD is really FUD, I did ask the 
> > Sun legal department to prove that. 
> > 
>
> Are you referring to:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-August/000472.html ?
> (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#Licensing_change )
>
> Do you know if there is more recent information about that?

What you quote is just a hint on that Mark Shuttleworth did break his promises.

I met him at OSCON 2008 in Portland and our discussion at OSCON was very 
promising. At that time we agreed on asking Sun legal..... I did ask Sun legal
soon (in early August 2008) but the review from Sun legal did take some time.
Mark Shuttleworth then asked me whether I would agree to ask Eben Moglen.
I replied that Moglen is well known for publishing untrue claims in the open
(he did write a lot of nonsense about what you can claim with the GPL in court
in 2001 when I was trying to sue seveal companies for using cdrtools in closed 
source Win32 applications - note this was a long time before Harald Welte tried 
similar things). For this reason, I told Mark that I would only agree on Moglen 
in case that he either sees no problems or writes a very in depth legal 
explanation where he sees problems. Moglen did make a review and did send me a 
private mail that there is no legasl problem with cdrtools. He also promised 
that he would write a publishable review than inlcudes his concirmation. At 
the same time, Sun legal confirmed that there is no legal problem. Moglen even
told me that the GPL FAQ on the FSF website is wrong but unfortunately Moglen 
then aborted his job and refused to write a legal review could be published to 
the open.

A short time later, Mark Shuttleworth tried to push Sun not to distribute 
cdrtools anymore. Sun did not follow his demands as Sun legal could not find
a problem in cdrtools.

I suspect that there are some people in the background that are in fear that
too many people learn that the GPL does not prevent to link a GPLd program
against any library under any license. See also:

http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf

Note that Lawrence Rosen is the lawyer of the OpenSource initiative and that
his review is only neutral paper from the US on the GPL. 

Note that the people who attack cdrtools use a GPL interpratation that is 
in conflict with the OpenSource Definition and that would make any Linux 
distribution illegal. 

Note that (with the help from Simon Phipps from Sun) Debian agreed on March 6th
2009 at Cebit to include cdrtools as soon as possible....

Jörg

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